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  BEAUTIFUL ANTONIO

  VITALIANO BRANCATI was born at Pachino, near Syracuse in Sicily in 1907 and was educated at Catania where he took a degree in literature. In 1924 he joined the Fascist party, but after being ‘Fascist to the roots of his hair’ as he said, he repudiated it completely, and The Lost Years, published in 1938, was the first fruit of his conversion. From 1937 he was a schoolteacher, but turned to full-time writing after the war. Don Giovanni in Sicilia was published in 1941 and in 1949 Il Bell’ Antonio won the Bagutta Prize. He also wrote short stories, plays and a considerable number of articles for the press. Brancati died in 1954 in Turin.

  Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written twelve novels, including Europa, Destiny, and, most recently, Rapids, as well as two non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, and two collections of essays, literary and historical. His many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Tabucchi, Calvino and Calasso.

  VITALIANO BRANCATI

  Beautiful Antonio

  Translated from the Italian by

  PATRICK CREAGH

  with an Introduction by

  TIM PARKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in Italy as Il Bell’ Antonio by Valentino Bompiani 1949

  First published in Great Britain as Antonio: The Great Lover 1952

  This translation first published by Harvill an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1993

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  1

  Copyright © Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A, 1949

  English translation © HarperCollins Publishers, 1993

  Introduction copyright © Tim Parks, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

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  EISBN: 978–0–141–91134–2

  To my wife

  Introduction

  Let’s start with a very Italian joke. A man goes into a tobacconist’s to ask for cigarettes and the shopkeeper gives him a pack with the health warning: “SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE!” Disturbed, the man hands the cigarettes back. “Sorry”, he says, “I didn’t want these. Could you give me the ones that cause death, please?”

  Impotence is worse than death. “May the Lord strike me down dead before sending me such a curse,” says one of the characters in The Beautiful Antonio. And he means it. An impotent man is “worth less than a foot rag.” And yet, paradoxically, chastity remains a virtue, or so the church has always maintained, and in particular the Catholic church in Italy. When the gorgeous and still adolescent Antonio turns even the most devout and spinsterish heads at mass, the priest invites his worried mother to pray that God may “call the boy back to Himself as soon as possible.” An uncontrolled sexual potency, then, is also worse than death.

  The Beautiful Antonio was written soon after the Second World War and published in 1949 when its author was forty-two. Born and brought up in Catania, on the east coast of Sicily below the volcano of Mount Etna, Vitaliano Brancati had been an enthusiastic Fascist until his late twenties, moving to Rome to begin a successful career in journalism. However, in 1934 when a novel he had written was banned for its erotic content, Brancati woke up to the repressive character of the regime and by 1937 he had retreated to Sicily to work as a schoolteacher and continue his writing from the safe backwaters of the provinces. The core of his creative work is made up of four novels written between 1934 and his early death in 1954. Each sets out with great energy to paint a grotesque and comic picture not just of Italy under Fascism but of human behaviour in general. Each could be characterized as involving a collision between vitality and despair. The Beautiful Antonio is indisputably the best.

  The genius of the book is to construct a profound conundrum: What is the relation between the sexual dysfunction that plagues Antonio and the world he lives in? Or is there no relation at all? Almost every reader will have a different response, yet the question, as Brancati poses it, is so dense with implication that it is impossible not to go on mulling over it long after the book has been closed. Our understanding of what character is, of the interaction between mind and body, of the contradictions at the heart of Western culture, all depend on our finding a credible solution – which, of course, we never will.

  Exact contemporary of his creator, Antonio is the son of moderately wealthy landowners in Catania. His father is a professed philanderer and choleric loudmouth; but loveable. His mother is quiet, anxious, devout, affectionate. Brancati likes to put his characters in evidently complementary relations to each other. Antonio’s parents are a double act; their conversations follow well-worn rails. But their only child is more mysterious. His handsome face and fine physique would seem to offer him his father’s role as a womaniser; when he is just sixteen the family maid writhes with desire for him, she has fits of hysteria. But Antonio shares his mother’s quietness, her passivity. He is taciturn, sweet, ineffably innocuous. For almost a hundred pages Brancati doesn’t let us know what lies behind this oddly quiet disposition. For a further seventy we are not allowed even a glimpse of what the young man himself is thinking.

  Antonio is beautiful. Il bell’ Antonio is the Italian title and the novel could be seen as a long meditation on beauty and its position in society. The story opens with a group of young Sicilians, who, like Brancati, come to Rome in the early 1930s to seek their fortune in the Fascist regime. Most of them are ugly and so busy chasing women they do not even notice the great works of art that surround them in the eternal city. Beauty is alien and unnecessary to them, almost invisible. The only beauty they recognize is Antonio’s, and that only because it is a quality which attracts women. In truth, Antonio doesn’t really chase the girls, they simply fall at his feet. They are desperate for him. His friends are in awe. Yet like the Michelangelos and Borrominis that they do not see, Antonio seems curiously excluded from the world of everyday action. It’s not clear what he actually does with the women who flock to him and aside from the most tenuous acquaintance with a certain powerful minister the young man proves quite u
nable to penetrate Fascism’s halls of power. Eventually his parents call him back to Sicily: it is time for their son to marry.

  Stylistically, Brancati loves to oscillate between an almost journalistic realism and a more colourful, narrative voice that takes us right back to Boccaccio’s Decameron, a voice that launches into story-telling with great dispatch and is never afraid of caricature. So these opening pages of the novel are full of comedy and extremity. The two styles overlap in the spoken words of its considerable gallery of characters, Brancati’s dialogue being at once absolutely credible yet full of the extravagance, blasphemy and bizarre earthiness that one does find in Italian speech. So and so “would pick up coins from the floor with his buttocks!” declares Antonio’s father. Or again, so and so “has a dick that could punch holes in stone.”

  Antonio, however, is always moderate in his speech, as if he were holding back, and this self-effacing manner is somehow at one with his enigmatic beauty. Again Brancati loves to work with stark contrasts. When Antonio is with his father, he lets him chatter on and simply agrees with him, humours him, even when the older man changes his mind more or less every time he opens his mouth. The two could not be more different, the one furiously, even grotesquely engaged in the world, the other graceful, but inert, limp. Crucially, Antonio allows his parents to choose his bride for him: the beautiful and pious Barbara Puglisi, daughter of a local notary.

  Fascism too, of course, enjoyed the extravagant gesture, the swagger of an exaggerated vitality, the cult of bold, determined action, in bed as well as on the battlefield. Mussolini as we know was notorious for his womanising. He claimed to have had thousands of women, although “he never wasted time taking his pants off,” regretted his long-term mistress Clara Petacci. Antonio’s father refers to the Duce as the Proco: the pig, epitome of sexual indulgence, and physical and moral ugliness. Antonio, it seems, comes from another planet. His visit to a Sicilian brothel with a group of Fascist dignitaries is one of the great set pieces of the book. The whores all want Antonio, but he politely declines, allowing the successful politicians to behave like goats. Everybody is in awe of the minister who manages three women in a single evening.

  But if Fascism sees life crudely in terms of success and failure, win or lose, the broader and older institution of the church offers the more subtle yardstick of right and wrong, sin and virtue. The position of sex in these two different schemes is problematic. In the masculine, Fascist vision it is always right for a man to have any woman he can. “I don’t let anything slip by,” says one of Antonio’s friends. Women are objects. “But your uncle’s wife?” protests another. “The ass makes no exceptions… start having scruples, and the others’ll be mounting her with both shoes on!”

  Sex, then, is a competition, a free for all. Getting laid is success and not getting laid is failure or, worse still, somebody else’s success. Again and again the book deploys an imagery that links sexual and military prowess, even sex and killing. But in the Christian scheme of things, of course, repeated sexual conquest is sin, betrayal is sin. The unchaste man, like the killer, is going to hell.

  Both schemes, however, have their internal contradictions. When the philanderer is asked what happens if someone mounts his sister or mother, he shouts: “Don’t talk about my mother and my sister! My mother and my sister have got nothing to do with it!” “But aren’t they women too?” replies his friend. For the church, and the upright community in general, despite all St. Paul’s teaching about the superiority of celibacy, chastity ceases to be a virtue in marriage. However piously her parents may have brought her up, however rigorously they have protected her innocence, Antonio’s rich in-laws want their daughter Barbara to have a child, to give the family a future, to provide an heir to their accumulated fortune.

  Marriage, of course, is par excellence an image of fusion, reconciliation of opposites, resolution of contradictions. Sexual potency finds a kind of chastity in what the church considers a sacrament; female modesty may be relaxed in the monogamous marriage bed. And, of course, sex and property are fused together in marriage. The wife brings her dowry as well as her body. The man offers protection, income.

  For Fascism too, despite the Duce’s notorious promiscuity, the institution of the family was to be supported at all costs. The nation’s vitality would express itself in its high birth rate, its production of young men and women prepared to live and die for Italy. In what he called “The battle for births,” Mussolini introduced cash prizes for the women who had most children and a “bachelor tax” on men over twenty-five who did not marry. In typically aggressive and ambiguous rhetoric, the Duce spoke of his determination to give the nation “a demographic whipping.”

  But after three years of marriage, Antonio’s beautiful wife is still not pregnant. In fact, as her scandalised parents discover, she is exactly as she was the day they gave her away in marriage, a virgin. To put it bluntly, the beautiful Antonio can’t get it up. When the news finally breaks it causes a greater scandal, greater confusion, than even the bombs that will soon be falling in wartime. It is as if every tacit compromise and hypocrisy that allows society to go on functioning had been exposed.

  Antonio’s impotence must become public because Barbara, or her family, will not accept the idea of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, they want the marriage annulled, declared never to have taken place, so that Barbara can marry again in church to a rich and corpulent nobleman. What is marriage then? Does it really cease to exist “for the mere fact that man and wife do not indulge in carnal acts,” those same carnal acts that the church is “constantly bothering us” by preaching against. Certainly Antonio loves Barbara, and she used to love him, till her maid told her what sex really was. In any event, if the marriage is to be annulled, if Barbara is to make a more lucrative marriage elsewhere, Antonio’s failure as a man will have to be declared before a church tribunal. “Antonio didn’t have the stuff of the real Fascist,” the local deputy party secretary subsequently writes to Antonio’s one important political contact in Rome.

  Any notion that a man might be an individual, whole unto himself, is now swept away in a storm of ridicule, speculation and scandal. Antonio’s “failure” is experienced as the failure of his whole tribe. Both father and friends feel obliged to embark on orgies of fornication and adultery to demonstrate that they remain untainted. The world at large marvels and revels in the handsome Antonio’s weakness. Trapped in a mesh of conflicting voices, one or two supportive, most full of contempt, Antonio falls into a defeatist mutism. He is now, as it were, aggressively passive; he spends all day in bed, he will not communicate.

  To get a sense of how far Brancati goes beyond a mere condemnation of Fascism or Catholicism here, it’s worth remembering another writer from the Catania area, Giovanni Verga. Born in 1840, Verga started his career as a writer of elegant society novels, but made his breakthrough in the late 1870s when, living in Milan, he turned to writing about the peasants in the backward part of Sicily where he had grown up. This was a time when the middle-class readers of the major European cities had begun to feel that acute nostalgia for the tight-knit communities of the rural past which is still with us today. Verga recreated those communities for his sophisticated public, but in a wonderful stroke of therapeutic irony he showed how, far from being havens of mutual support, there was actually nothing crueller than the traditional peasant community, particularly when, for some reason, an individual broke society’s rules or failed in some way to fit in. And although to the reader the chorus of pious rhetoric deployed by the community to destroy the unmarried mother, or the girl who cannot afford to stay at home and nurse a dying parent, is evidently hypocritical, the victim inevitably succumbs to that rhetoric and considers him or herself a guilty failure. There is no question in Verga of anyone reaching an independent position outside the chorus of hypocrisy. Everyone is at the whim of the cruel collective ethos.

  Likewise Antonio. Even when his reason can calmly dismiss an idea as absurd, his
mind nevertheless remains prey to every stray voice and even begins to invent those voices when they are not actually heard. Invited to take part in an anti-fascist meeting he finds himself equating political protest with failure and failure with sexual impotence. “They are always talking about philosophy and liberty because they can’t get a hard on,” he thinks. Even though the private lives of one or two of the men present remind him that this is not actually the case, he nevertheless feels the men are, as he puts it, “stained with purity.”

  This use of oxymoron alerts us to a general tendency in Brancati’s work to stand traditional wisdom on its head. Antonio’s mother protests to her confessor that the church is punishing her son for having behaved with Barbara in the very same way that Joseph behaved with Mary. Was the Virgin’s marriage null? In perhaps the key passage in the book, Antonio and his uncle go together into an empty church. Despite the fact that nobody is there, Antonio feels the pressure of the institution’s judgement of him, as if every painting and statue stared at him with disapproval. His sympathetic uncle, the only man who takes time to understand Antonio, is dying and so disillusioned with Fascism, with life, that he is indeed eager to die. In an extraordinary passage, he struggles to pray, but reaches the frightening conclusion that the idea of Christ is as empty of content as it is beautiful, and salvation merely a dream. If Christ is the church’s spouse, he hasn’t delivered, and we erstwhile believers are “disappointed lovers.” In short, Christ too is impotent.

  So what exactly is wrong with Antonio? Brancati’s cleverness is to give us just one long statement from the sufferer himself. Hard pressed by his uncle, Antonio at last tells his story. But if, after all the book’s hints of possible links between the moral ugliness of the time and Antonio’s problems, we expected some cerebral, lucid assessment of his malaise, we will be surprised. Antonio tells a long, detailed, moving story of his dealings with women. It serves to dismiss any question that Brancati is using his predicament merely as a metaphor for a certain kind of personality disorder under Fascism. In particular, the extent to which, as a handsome man, Antonio has always felt himself to be a prey to female passion, to a disturbing voraciousness behind the rhetoric of romance and modesty, again suggests a layer of interpretation that goes beyond a comment on the contemporary situation.